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Ignatius Loyola commended Spiritual Exercises as a way to joining the soul to the divine(http://www.ccel.org/ccel/ignatius/exercises.html). Aquinas located the self within a broadcosmology, which enabled personkind to see its place in relation to the vegetative, animative andspiritual domains(see. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.i.html?highlight=thomas,aquinas#highlight).Undergirding each of these Christian philosophies is an unreconstructed rehearsal of platonicnotions of the self as a pre-existent formless entity which comes to earth at birth, ‘mingles withthe flesh’, becomes human for its lifetime and then departs the body at death, returning to thespiritual realm. MacQuarrie, attempting to explicate this for an existentialist audience, says,“How then is this structure of the self constituted? We may begin by recalling that inGreek philosophy there were various theories about the self or soul, and that Plato andAristotle present us with an interesting contrast. Plato may be taken as an exponent of the“substantial” soul. On this view, the soul is regarded as capable of existing apart from thebody. […] Aristotle, on the other hand, thinks of the soul as the “form” of the body, andas continuing to exist after the dissolution of the body.” (MacQuarrie, 1977 p. 74)Subduing the body, by the will of the soul/spirit/self is, for many of the aforementioned ‘doctorsof the Church’, the moral purpose of a lifetime. It is, however a counter-intuitive pastime and,paradoxically, incompatible with the Christian doctrine that to separate mind from body isdualistic and thus heretical.More recently, theologians have seen the importance of an understanding of the self as thestarting point for liberative actions in the quest for freedom (e.g., Moltmann, 1967; Gutierrez,1970; Boff, 1981; Metz, 1981). Each self, as referenced in the works of these authors, is a beingsituated in a real context at a real time, suffering politically or physically, disenfranchised,marginalised and in need of liberation. However, each self, in collaboration with others has the44Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)